claudia mate

MEXICO CITY- The past month has been a crazy time for Mexico City’s art scene between art fairs, pop-ups, and countless openings/performances at museums and galleries. I’ll be posting updates of highlights—starting with group show The Queen Falls at Galería OMR, Rafael Uriegas: Cueva Semilla Sol & Keke Vilabelda: Overwrite at Galería Karen Huber, and a pop-up from digital art edition producers Janet40.

With John Berger’s death this month, the online premiere of Lorna Mills’ “Ways of Something, 3” feels particularly poignant. While Mills’s “Ways of Something” wasn’t conceived strictly as an update, as 117 person re-interpretation it effectively functions as such. To complete this piece, Mills invited over 100 artists to remake all four parts of Berger’s 1972 BBC series “Ways of Seeing”, minute by minute. Each artist was given 60 seconds of video—doled out on a first come first serve basis—with the sole condition that they would need to retain the text used in captioning. What they did to the captioning font, the visuals, the sound, was entirely up to them.

The result is almost certainly the largest video exquisite corpse in existence. Similar to the first Surrealist conceived exquisite corpse drawings, where each half is made blind of the other, each artist creates a minute without knowing what will come before or after it.

These are but a small sampling of the many GIFs in Claudia Maté’s “gif ssense summer sale campaign,” The webpage is a grid of hilariously obnoxious advertisements that feature everything from exploding wildlife to a television being penetrated by a skeleton. Really, click on the link, because you really ought to immerse yourself in the 34th-street-like consumer dystopia of it all.

Faith Holland questions the early web-enthusiasts’ utopian vision of the internet as the ultimate democratic space, free of identity politics.

Today, I was deep in a Google Image Search hole looking for GIFs to illustrate our guides to the Republican and Democratic primaries. I discovered two things. One, when you search for “clown car” one of the first results is the 2016 Republican Primaries. The second was this all-star collection of “democracy” GIFs from some of our favorite artists at 15 Folds. Konbini has a write-up for each of them.

Claudia Maté’s“Noise of the Lambs” adds blue stars and red stripes to a white sheep. This is the most apt metaphor for American politics out of the bunch.

“Walking Still, Still Walking“ by Eva Papamargariti. Is Democracy a long and arduous march? A race? A stampeding hoard? Probably all of the above.

Madrid-based artist Claudia Maté created this character that seems to be a response to the “Girls Don’t Poop” meme. She’s exaggeratedly sexy, except she’s spewing diarrhea as she dances. It is amazing, and maybe serves as a reminder to avoid certain foods before heading to the club.

I was just saying the other day that I don’t see enough Greek and Roman statues in contemporary art for my taste. Cudos to Claudia Maté for attempting to solve that problem with this creepy elastic bust. A 21st century hero, above.

One day of mourning David Bowie is not enough. His music and performances are too important to let him go. As such, I’ve downloaded as many GIFs as possible from the animated GIF show Lorna Mills curated for the Art Gallery of Ontario’s 2013 “David Bowie is” exhibition . The exhibition included over 15 artists from countries all around the world.(Rea McNamara discussed her GIFs for the show yesterday.) Some of the GIFs, now, look oddly prescient.

Sadly, we never reviewed the GIF show—it was up for one night only—but we did get to see the traveling exhibition. We weren’t happy with it.

Titled “Blossom”, this GIF by Giselle Zatonyl shows crystalline-like blossom wrapped in a rotating polygon. The shape hovers just above the fast moving clouds. The GIF is part of AFC’s 10 Anniversary Benefit GIF collection, which is nothing short of incredible.

Jennifer Chan knows what she’s doing. As soon as I clicked on a Dropbox link to view “lossy.gif” I thought of Joan Jonas’s “Vertical Roll” (1972). And yes, Chan notes it’s a reference in “lossy.gif”—she knows what she’s doing.

The heavens exploded and in its wake, we received clouds. Not just any clouds, though: Faith Holland’s painterly GIF, “Equivalents,” shows us a milieu of digital and analog clouds that defy time and space. They’re trans-dimensional, trans-chronological. But none of that makes this a crazy GIF. No, it’s a scene of organized chaos. Every Mario-Brothers cloud stays in its own lane, never crashing into the serious gray stratus clouds that plod along at a different speed. To each their own, in this racetrack in the sky.